In terms of protecting my students while online and teaching them to use the web appropriately, the three main aspects that I focus on are their protection, avoidance of plagiarism and academic misconduct, and selection of trustworthy sources.
With all students it is the teacher's responsibility to protect them while they are online, but for middle school and elementary school teachers, it is even more important to provide students with protection while online. The Child Internet Protection Act and school web filters do much of the heavy lifting on that front, but teachers are still very much charged with teaching students how to protect themselves (Richardson 2010). Such lessons as not giving out personal identifiers to strangers, creating a safe and secure password, and how to react to cyberbullying can have a profound impact on how safe students are while online. Open Colleges, an online university out of Australia, offers a robust guide to safety on the internet for students that covers both cyberbullying and privacy protection in great depth. The guide includes a list of common forms of cyberbullying along with descriptions of them, some of the legal consequences of cyberbullying, and steps that students can take in reaction to cyberbullying. The site also includes sections on internet privacy, including what to protect and how to protect it, and computer viruses. While the guide calls itself an "interactive guide," there is not much interactivity in the sense that many students look for. Instead, the guide offers easy to understand text with eye-catching illustrations and a flying superhero as a navigation bar.
The second consideration that I have about training students to use the internet appropriately is related to the increasing amount of work that students are asked to complete using the internet and technology in general. Many times, in an age in which information is so easy to come by, students are tempted to use information or work that they find online as their own without giving proper credit. In my career as an educator, I have encountered my fair share of students who try to pass off someone else's work as their own. Teaching students about plagiarism and how to avoid it is one of my pet projects as a former journalist. In the past I have used self-made presentations to teach about plagiarism, but in my research, I found KidsHealth, a website authored by Nemours, a children's health center. The website includes a relatively interactive section on plagiarism that I would use as a part of my lesson on plagiarism. The site includes descriptions of plagiarism, role playing for students to recognize plagiarism and ways to avoid plagiarism. The site also includes audio recordings of the content to allow all students to access the text.
Along with plagiarism, my students often struggle to find trustworthy and appropriate websites to use in their research. While my district offers a a robust set of online research tools through Cobb Virtual Library which is powered by MackinVia, my students often seek to use outside resources. This can be quite a task, but there are some resources available that can help teach the skills that students need to evaluate websites for use in research. One method that is available through a website and can be used offline is RADCAB. RADCAB is an acronym that describes the steps that students should take in evaluating websites from Relevancy to Bias. The website describes each aspect of the acronym in detail, and offers some brief examples. The website also offers a poster of the acronym for teachers to use in the classroom.
A second resource for teaching about evaluating sources and one that is perhaps the most interactive of all that I have found is All About Explorers. The site itself is meant to help teachers teach students about using the internet, and it is aimed at elementary students. It includes a webquest to guide students through some processes that accomplishes that task. The real treasure trove for teachers is the For Teachers section that includes links to one-off lessons about searching the internet that are appropriate for students of different ages. The lessons include information on evaluating websites, search terms, and search engines like Google.
The internet offers a wealth of information for students, but it also hold some dangers. The key to keeping students safe online is not sequestering them away from any possible danger but teaching them the ways to avoid trouble on their own an react to appropriately when they do encounter it.
Resources
Aungst, G. & Zucker, L. (n.d.). All About Explorers. Retrieved from:
Christensson, K. M. RADCAB, (2013, October26). Retrieved from: www.radcab.com.
Cyber Safety: An Interactive Guide To Staying Safe On The Internet. (2013). Retrieved from: http://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/cyber-safety/
Dowshen, S. (September 2011). "What is plagiarism?" Retrieved from: http://kidshealth.org/kid/feeling/school/plagiarism.html#
Richardson, W. (2010) “Blogs, wikis, podcasts and other powerful web tools for classrooms.” Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.